The route for the 2024 Tour de France is set to feature summit finishes at Pla d’Adet, Plateau de Beille, and Isola 2000, as well as taking on gravel roads and a time trial in the opening week, according to the latest rumours.
The parcours for the 111th edition of La Grande Boucle will be officially unveiled in Paris on Wednesday morning, with organisers ASO closely guarding their roadmap ahead of their glitzy ceremony in the French capital’s Palais des Congrès. However, the annual rumour mill has once again been in full swing and an outline of the route has come into focus.
Read more: Giro d’Italia 2024 route revealed
The French local newspapers, ever-eager to let people know if and when the Tour might be gracing their region with its presence, have been awash with reports of the circus coming to town, while hotel availability has once again proved a staple source of matching towns against dates.
The chief sleuth has been, as ever, Thomas Vergouwen, who goes to great lengths to piece all this information together at his Velowire website. His success rate over the years has been remarkable, which would lead us to believe the pretty solid picture he has mapped out already won’t be far wide of the mark come Wednesday.
What we know for certain so far
We already have five stages fully confirmed for the 2024 Tour de France – three at the start and two at the end.
The Grand Départ will take place in Italy, while the finish has had to be moved away from Paris for the first time in the race’s rich history, and will instead conclude down in Nice on the south coast.
For the third year in a row, the Tour will start on foreign soil, with Italy hosting the build-up and the opening three stages. Stage 1 will get underway from Florence in Tuscany on Saturday 29 June and, after passing through San Marino, will finish in Rimini, where 1998 Tour de France winner Marco Pantani died 25 years ago. It’s a hilly affair as the route crosses the Apennines, with over 3,000 metres of elevation gain before the last of seven categorised climbs tops out in San Marino before the 25km run down to the Adriatic coast.
Stage 2 takes place in the Emilia-Romagna region and is a puncheur’s paradise. Starting in Pantani’s home town of Cesenatico, the route runs north west to Bologna to borrow from the route of the Giro dell’Emilia, with a double ascent of the steep and striking San Luca climb (1.9km at 10.6%), followed by a fast and twisting 10km run to the line.
After another hilly start to the Tour – even if not on the same level as 2023’s visit to Bilbao – the sprinters will have their chance on stage 3, which contains three categorised climbs but none that are realistically going to prevent a bunch finish in Turin, which also plays a leading role in the start of the 2024 Giro d’Italia.
As for the finish in Nice, the organisers have confirmed the final two stages, with a double whammy of critical general classification days to end the race: a summit finish and a time trial.
Stage 20 starts in Nice but ventures inland to the Alpes-Maritimes to take on the Col de Braus, Col de Turini, Col de la Colmiane ahead of a summit finish on the Col de la Couillole (15.7km at 7.1%), which has been a key part of Paris-Nice in recent years.
While the final stage is usually a procession and a sprint up the Champs-Elysées, this time it’ll be competitive, and decisive. Stage 21 is an individual time trial, measuring 35km from Monaco to Nice. Instead of hugging the coast road, it quickly nips inland to head up the La Turbie and Col d’Eze before a long descent back to the coast for a short run up and down the Promenade des Anglais to finish the Tour.
Tour de France 2024 route: The latest rumours
The finish of stage 3 in Turin is where the official information ends, and where the dots have started to be linked together. Stage 4 is set to start in Italy but take the race into France, and the only realistic way of doing this is by crossing the Alps, so we should get some early high-mountain action, even if it may not be a decisive or overly difficult stage so soon in the race, with France Bleu reporting the finish will be in Valloire – so not a summit finish.
After a heavy helping of hills in the opening few days, the sprinters look set to get a double dose as the race leaves the Alps to head north up France’s east flank. Stage 5 will reportedly finish near Lyon in Saint Vulbas – where Nacer Bouhanni won a stage of the 2016 Dauphiné – and stage 6 looks likely to conclude in Dijon, a famous home to some of the finest mustard and wine in the world.
Multiple reports indicate a time trial on stage 7 of the race, and this is the only other TT that has been rumoured so far, which would fit with ASO’s general aversion to the discipline. Team time trials can take place ‘in the first third of the race,’ so while it’s technically possible, it’s realistically too far in for a team test, with the possibility of crashes and abandons making the prospect complicated.
At the moment, the length and parcours are unclear. Le Bien Public reports that it will start in Gevrey-Chambertin and finish in Nuits-Saint-Georges, but a straight line route would be barely 10km so it would remain to be seen what roads are taken, but it is an area of rolling vineyard countryside.
The opening week will come to a close in Troyes, with France Bleu reporting what would be a remarkable double stage finish for the city. Details on stage 8 are hard to come by, but stage 9 would appear to be the gravel stage that has already been widely reported. This would take place in the Côte des Bars in Champagne country and would be inspired by the Tour de France Femmes, which used those roads on a dramatic stage of its inaugural edition two years ago.
Read more: Gravel set to feature in Tour de France 2024 route
It’s unclear how much gravel we’ll see, but L’Est Eclair reports that the route would take in the areas of Haute-Marne, Côte-d’Or, and l’Yonne, with dusty white gravel tracks among the vineyards. The Tour de France Femmes stage featured 12.9km of gravel over four sectors, while the last bit of gravel at the men’s Tour – beyond the stretch atop the Super Planche des Belles Filles – was the stoney off-road section beyond the Plateau des Glières used on stage 18 in 2020.
Pyrenees and Alps
Troyes, 100km south of Paris, looks to be the most northerly point of the 2024 Tour de France, with Velowire confident of a rest day in Orléans, which would then see the race set off for its second week. This looks largely like a transition down to the Pyrenees in the very south of the country for a weekend double-header of mountain stages.
Stage 10 is said to finish in Julian Alaphilippe’s hometown of Saint Amand Montrond, where a bunch sprint is likely on paper. Nevertheless, in this part of the country crosswinds can rip up the script on a dime – see Mark Cavendish’s stage victory in 2013 for evidence on that front.
The Massif Central medium mountain range of central France looks set to come into play as the race continues south, with France Bleu reporting that stage 11 will finish in Le Lioran re-tracing the route of stage 5 of the 2016 Tour, with the climbs of Puy Mary, Col du Perthus and Col de Font de Cère deep into the finale. Greg Van Avermaet won from the breakaway that day.
Villeneuve-sur-Lot has been reported as the finish town of stage 12, while Pau has been linked for stage 13, with both stages liable to end in sprint finishes. Pau is a staple of the Tour de France and is often dubbed the ‘gateway’ to the Pyrenees, where a double header of summit finishes appear to await, according to the Occitanie arm of France Bleu.
The first of these is said to be Pla d’Adet, which would mark the 50th anniversary of the first visit and Raymond Poulidor’s victory there in 1974. The climb was last used in 2014, with Rafal Majka winning the stage and Vincenzo Nibali strengthening his grip on the yellow jersey. Measuring more than 10km at an average gradient of over 8%, it’s a tough hors catégorie-rated ascent.
The following day’s summit finish, rounding out the second week, would be Plateau de Beille, which was last used in 2015 in the Tour won by Chris Froome. Although there weren’t too many GC fireworks that day, it’s another HC climb, longer at 16km but only slightly less steep than Pla d’Adet.
With the final two stages of the 2024 Tour de France already confirmed, that leaves four of the six stages of the final week to be filled in, and the first task is to move from the Pyrenees over to the Alps. Stage 16, then, would appear to be a classic transition stage, with a rumoured finish in Nîmes, where a bunch sprint would be the likely outcome.
It might only take one transition stage, as the Dauphiné LIbéré newspaper reports a summit finish in the ski resort of Superdévoluy on stage 17. Stage 18 looks like a breakaway day with a reported route between Gap and Barcelonette, and it would have to be given the difficulties ahead, with stage 19 looking near certain to feature a summit finish at Isola 2000.
The Mayor of Nice has effectively confirmed as much, and the Dauphiné Libérésketches this out as a short, intense, high-altitude stage that scales the Col de Vars (2,120m), the Col de la Bonnette (2,802m), and then the final ascent to the ski resort of Isola at, as the name suggests, 2,000m altitude. It would surely be the Queen stage of the race.
Visit our Tour de France home page for all the latest news, including full details and analysis of the 2024 route once it is announced on Wednesday, October 25.
